"Isn't it the same thing?"

I smile, leaning against my worn-out Honda. "No, Franklin, it's not. We aren't professional musicians. We work in a music store. And Clive has more students than all of us."

He runs that through his head, doing the figures. He says, "He has fourteen. Same as you."

"I have thirteen."

"Since when?"

"I don't teach Hallie Bolaris anymore."

He seems surprised by this information. He knew Hallie, as all the people in McCoy's did, because she came in so often (never missed a lesson, and sometimes took extras), and because her unofficially adopted mother, Mrs. Edwards, used to amuse the people in the store while she waited for Hallie to finish. Mrs. Edwards hated music and wasted no time in telling everyone that. Sometimes she would hover over Declan as he repaired instruments. She'd say to him, "Let me ask you something. Why do you have such a long beard?"

Declan, easily the most even tempered and well adjusted of the McCoy's employees, said, "Because I don't like to shave."

Mrs. Edwards said, "I don't like to clean the toilet, but it has to be done."

Declan said, "I like to clean the toilet. I do it with my beard."

That pretty much finished their relationship. She moved on to Ernest, who often played guitar on the floor when business was slow. She'd watch him, unable to stop herself from being drawn in by his playing, which was quite impressive.

She'd say to him, "You look like a smart young man. Why are you wasting your time in a music store?"

Ernest said, "I tried wasting it in other places, but I usually got arrested."

This was true of Ernest. He was a real musician, which meant that he had encountered (and overcome) serious substance-abuse problems. Most real musicians don't overcome them, or didn't in my day. No one of my generation ever expected to see Keith Richards or Eric Clapton welcome in the new millennium. We are all still a bit thrown by that, which is why we sometimes refer to them as sellouts.

Pretty soon, Hallie and Dorothy had become the stuff of legend at McCoy's. People looked forward to Wednesdays, when Hallie came, because they were certain to be entertained. It was Hallie who indirectly inst.i.tuted the Wednesday night discussion group, wherein all the employees of McCoy's would hang around telling funny stories about our exploits, and then we'd move on to talk of music, and eventually we would play instruments and wouldn't end up leaving the shop until around midnight.

We no longer had the Wednesday night discussion group because it went away when Hallie did. I'm the only one at McCoy's who makes that connection. Everyone else thinks we all just got busy, even though n.o.body's any busier.

"What happened to Hallie?" he asks.

"I don't know."

"She just disappeared?"

"Something like that."

"Did she say why?"

Did she say why? She did and she didn't.

Did I know why?

I did and I didn't.

"No, she never told me. Directly. Her mother said something. Her foster mother. It was complicated."

Franklin's face registers a modic.u.m of concern for me. In the old days, I would have mistaken it for love. But the reason I am alone now is that I've learned to tell the difference.

"You said she was your best student."

"She was more than that. She had the potential to be great. The way she understood the instrument."

"Better than you?"

"Yes, much better than me. Maybe that's why she stopped coming. Because I had nothing left to teach her."

Franklin doesn't want to hear this. He shakes his head and shifts his guitar up on his shoulder. He clings to that guitar as if it were a security blanket. It is a security blanket. That is what all our instruments are to us. The difference between me and Franklin is that I know it.

"She was just a kid," he says. "I'm sure she just got bored."

Franklin appears to be stuck in this place where youth is the enemy. Maybe it's resentment; maybe it's envy. Maybe he thinks that young people have the gift of opportunity awaiting them, while the truth is that like anyone else, they have to wade through the mud of confusion before they can confront the landscape of possibility.

But I let him think it was her youth that led her down the sinkhole, because the truth is too hard. There are two possible scenarios. In one, I am crazy. In the other, I am cruel. Time does not smooth out the edges of those choices.

I stare at the cars moving past in erratic colors like pills. The colors don't mean anything. It's just how you tell one from the other.

I say, "What do you think it means when the scriptures say unless you're like a child you can't enter the kingdom of heaven? Jesus couldn't have been talking about innocence or happiness or painlessness."

Franklin looks at me as if I'm not well.

"I don't think about the scriptures, Pearl. Why do you?"

"I don't know. Because I'm from the South. I was raised with it."

"I was raised with a lot of crazy ideas I've left behind," he says.

"It doesn't seem like a crazy idea. It seems like a mysterious one."

"You're not from the South. You're from Virginia."

"Last capital of the Confederacy. Danville, Virginia. My hometown. That's not the South? I will drop them a note."

Franklin is almost done with me now. He doesn't like to talk about the South. He doesn't want too much truth at once. Who does? The fact is, I am from a real place, with a real musical heritage. He is from a land that someone dreamed, and the dream is not complete. California is still entirely open to interpretation. The South has been defined. It has gone to war. California has gone to skirmish. It is still looking for a war. In the interim, its contradictions are played out on the battlegrounds of music and art and status. Los Angeles is swollen with hope and infected with aspiration. But there are good places to eat and an ocean.

He starts away, then turns back. He says, "Hey, Pearl, it's eleven hours before the world ends. What kind of music do you play on the violin?"

"Bluegra.s.s," I tell him.

This surprises him. Franklin fancies himself a bluegra.s.s guitar player. He thinks I fancy myself a cla.s.sical musician. But I am curiously devoid of knowledge in that area. I present the music to my students- the cold, complicated sheets of notation required to emulate the greats. But I cleave to the mountain music, the made-up stuff, the accident of pa.s.sion converging on intellectual restriction. The marriage of ignorance and ideals. This is where music is really found.

Franklin doesn't accept that being born in the wrong place is keeping him from making truly beautiful sounds come out of his guitar. That's why he wants to be a session musician. That's what you do when you give up.

"You? Bluegra.s.s?" he asks, his face an open question mark.

"Sure."

"Why?"

"Because eleven hours before the world ends, I'd want to be close to G.o.d."

He has nothing to say to that. He turns on his heel and walks away. I watch him go, his guitar b.u.mping against his hip, nagging him, as a good woman might do.

THERE IS NOTHING in my place when I get home. I used to have a cat, but it scared me too much to be a single music teacher with a cat. The cat's name was Roy. Roy used to mock me. I can't explain how. He just did. I had named him after Roy Orbison, which was probably my first mistake. I love Roy Orbison, but he was a tragic figure. His wife died in a motorcycle accident, and two of his children died in a house fire. He never got over their loss. It was why he made such beautiful music. It was why he died in his fifties, just as his career was taking off again. His heart was worn out; he couldn't take it anymore. When that happens, we call it a heart attack. But the heart never attacks. It simply breaks.

One day, back when I was teaching Hallie and obsessed with her progress, I went to work without closing the patio door in my apartment. Roy ran away. Can you blame him? I couldn't. But I did attempt to look for him, put up flyers, the whole thing. My landlord, a disheveled old hippie alcoholic named Steve, approached me in the lobby one day and said, "Pearl, I know you want to find your cat, but the truth is, you aren't supposed to have pets in this building. It's, like, policy."

"You don't have to worry, Steve. Roy isn't coming back. I just had to make an effort to find him."

"If I'd known you had a pet, I wouldn't have leased the apartment."

I said, "If I'd known you were an alcoholic, I wouldn't have signed the lease."

Steve left me alone after that. Sometimes you have to use the truth in that way. G.o.d forgives it.

Shortly after that, I moved. I like to think it was because I needed a change. I prefer not to think that I was running from the ghost of Roy. But my new home is a dead and lonely place where I still think of Roy. Just as my job feels like a dead and lonely place where I still think of Hallie. I do my level best not to obsess about her. I usually have several gla.s.ses of wine when I come home, and eventually I get drunk enough and bored enough with what's on television to put a frozen dinner in the microwave. I usually overcook it, then I eat it, and then I sc.r.a.pe up the burned bits with a fork and eat that, too.

This takes up a lot of energy, so I eventually get into the bathtub and I go to bed. When I fall asleep, things get weird. Because I dream. It's the only time I allow myself to dream, and I wouldn't even allow it then if I could help it. But as a student of mine once said, "My brain has a mind of its own." I dream of my past, in Danville, Virginia, and I dream of my future, in Los Angeles, California, and the two worlds don't like each other much. I toss and turn and grind my teeth. I broke a molar once. Sometimes I even sleepwalk. Or sleep-run. I woke up, just a few weeks ago, running around my living room. When I came to, I felt foolish. I was wearing sweatpants and a tank top. I was saying out loud, "There is no such thing as fire. There is no such thing as fire."

It's funny, at least to me, that I woke up saying, "There is no such thing as fire."

My father, a carpenter by trade, knew all about fire. He knew about it because he knew about wood. He knew which kind would burn under what conditions. He even knew that if you vacuumed sawdust the vacuum cleaner would catch fire, something to do with the sparks in the motor creating combustion in the wood. He knew what would start a fire and what would stop it. He knew how fire behaved, how it moved, what made it advance and turn back. And once a fire got big enough, he cautioned me, "Don't try to fight it. It's going to win."

It created confusion, his stories about wood and fire. You'd think a friend of the wood would hate the fire, but he didn't. He respected it. He saw beauty in it. Not in the aesthetic, I imagine, because he never cared for colors that I could tell. But in its powers of destruction, which I suppose he saw as a creative act.

Maybe people in his generation had been told the stories of Sherman's March to the Sea and had never recovered. Maybe he knew a thousand things I couldn't know because of his strange, sad past full of poverty and scandal and things he had done to pull himself out and still couldn't talk about to the day he died.

I wondered what he would think if I told him there was no such thing as fire.

Before he died, when we used to talk about politics in quick, painful bursts, he tried to tell me there were no homeless people in America. And if there were, they had done something to deserve it. Not like his people. They had done nothing to deserve poverty, but this generation was different. His generation had had wars and depressions and all. We had no such legacy.

Hallie was homeless. Not in the traditional sense, of course. She was being taken care of by Aunt Dorothy, but she had not really known what a home felt like. Her parents had died too young. Because they had lived too hard. Her father was a gifted musician, and he checked out when she was seven. Her mother had hung in there for as long as possible, but she was a struggling singer-turnedartist. She sang like an angel, Hallie told me. After her husband died, she stopped singing and started to paint. Because Hallie's mother had gotten so close to G.o.d, as singers and artists often do, she had elected to check out. Hallie's mother was a heroin addict. Hallie didn't tell me that. Her adopted mother did.

She told me one Wednesday when Hallie showed up for a lesson. Unpacking her violin, Hallie realized she had left her rosin for the bow in the car. She excused herself and went out to get it.

Dorothy said to me, "The child has seen hard times, you know."

"Yes," I said.

"Her mother was a drug addict."

"That's terrible," I said. I didn't really think it was so terrible. I thought it was simply a choice. But I said that in order to get Dorothy to talk. It worked.

"Heroin," Dorothy whispered to me. Sitting up straight, she said, "And there was no excuse for it. My sister was a brilliant artist."

"A violinist?" I asked.

"No, an artist. Like with paint. She painted beautiful pictures. But art is expensive, you know? She married a horrible man, thinking he would support her, but all he did was drink himself to death."

"He was a musician?"

"He was a scoundrel. Cheated on my sister and bled her dry."

I nodded. I understood. I said, "What happened to her art?"

Dorothy took a breath and said, "She had just painted a series of pictures that were getting a lot of attention. She painted musicians. She went out into the streets of Sierra Madre and she painted people playing their guitars. Then she just started painting guitars. They were beautiful, brightly colored things. Celebrities started to buy them. They did a piece on her for a news show. She was making money and she was starting to get famous . . ."

Dorothy stopped. But I wasn't ready to quit.

"What happened?"

Dorothy shrugged. "What happens with all you people? She started using drugs, and one day they found her. Curled up in a ball in the bathroom. Dead from an overdose."

"Who found her?" I asked.

Dorothy knew what I was asking.

"Hallie found her."

Then we heard Hallie's footsteps on the stairs, and we both sat in silence as Hallie emerged, holding nothing in her hands.

"I left my rosin at home," she said.

"That's all right," I told her. "I can rosin your bow. Let's just get started."

Dorothy looked at me, connecting, and then said in that long-suffering way, "I'll be downstairs."

And so she was. Always waiting.

I POUR MYSELF another gla.s.s of wine and turn on the news and stare at it for a long time before turning it off again.

It is quiet and I'm listening for instruction.

I hear a voice somewhere. It says, Account for Hallie.

And I say to the voice, Give me an easier task.

The voice says no.

3.